End the overspend for unnecessary licences

Negotiating software licensing is no fun. The process is time-consuming and burdened with uncertainty about exact use, requirements and entitlements.

There is also the fear that an audit might reveal under-licensing and that subsequent fines might be levied by a software vendor.

The costs of software licensing and of maintaining all IT systems account for the lion’s share of budgets. Poor visibility into these systems means many IT departments unknowingly overspend on software or fall foul of compliance standards.

IT budgets are tighter than ever. But we think you can end the trend of overspending for unnecessary and unused software licences.

According to Forrester Research, software licensing and pricing will continue to be marred by complexity, exacerbated by rising maintenance costs and inflexibility.

Ask: what are you entitled to, where are the assets located and being used, and what are the requirements of the business?

Typically, procurement teams are responsible for gathering information about existing entitlements. This is not easy, particularly if different departmental groups have bought things, or if the company has recently been taken over, for example.

Clients who know more will make better buying choices.

Information on existing entitlements should always exist in an asset management system. However, most companies have incomplete and outdated information in the procurement system.

There is no quick way to fix this, though, as agreements need to be manually entered into such systems. Large companies often do it one contract at a time as they near the end of an agreement.

Information on where software licences are deployed can be useful in software negotiations as some vendors offer site licences and varied pricing by location.

Some vendors charge for a new licence upgrade or price by platform. Information on the number of deployed licences by version and platform needs to be collected.

Unanticipated changes in licensing models also make it difficult for manual inventories to collect all the information needed for future requirements.

Automated tools that collect relevant information and are flexible for future requirements will obviously help in software negotiations and maintaining compliance.

Vendor information is also key. Software vendors that merge or acquire other vendors will often want to renegotiate licensing terms. This is beneficial to a customer if they own products from both vendors, as volume discounts and lower combined maintenance agreements can be negotiated.

Consider also the source of your information. Information sources abound, but are often incomplete or correct so a variety should be sampled to develop the most accurate picture of what is going on.

Asset management systems, for instance, often do not offer thorough discovery or inventory analysis and rely on other systems to feed in the data necessary to determine where and how the assets are being deployed and used.

Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) also rely on other sources of data. Many CMDB vendors offer discovery tools. A CMDB manages the configuration of IT assets for operational purposes – so CMDB information is not represented in a way that supports data analysis for software licence negotiations.

Some CMDB vendors have acquired IT asset management systems, but their comfort zone remains around the operational management of datacentres.

Configuration and patch management systems are mostly agent-based and often difficult to deploy. These systems often give an incomplete view because software needs to be installed and maintained on every asset, which does not always happen.

Most companies will therefore cobble together information from various sources, augmenting it with manual inventory and prodigious amounts of data manipulation in Excel.

This can take several months. The data is at risk of being obsolete as soon as it has been completed. But an automated system would use less time and manual resource and the data is more likely to be accurate.

Eric Faurisson is general manager for Europe at BDNA